Video: Tucker Carlson presses his case on 2007 Obama speech

posted at 10:01 am on October 3, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

The morning after the big reveal on last night’s Hannity, The Daily Caller’s Tucker Carlson appeared on Fox and Friends to press his case that the media deliberately underplayed Barack Obama’s June 2007 speech to Hampton University. Carlson tells Steve Doocy that the media covered the speech — including himself — but limited their reporting to the prepared remarks. Had they played the actual tape, especially when Obama talked about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 Democratic primary may have looked a lot different:

Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson said on Fox and Friends this morning that the “very revealing” clip is an example of Obama using racially-charged rhetoric.

The speech, given at Hampton University, also shows Obama shouting out Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who was in the audience. He tells the crowd, “The people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!”

Carlson explained that in his view, “Obama is telling a majority-black audience that the federal government doesn’t like them because they’re black. He is whipping up fear, and paranoia, and hatred.”

Actually, I think the larger point here isn’t that Obama pandered to black audiences. Every Democrat on the national stage does that. Hillary Clinton adopted what we could gracefully call a “Southern patois” in similar circumstances at that time that doesn’t emerge under any other circumstances. John Edwards’ Carolina drawl grew stronger in those appearances, too. Joe Biden did the same a few weeks ago in order to feed the same kind of racial demagoguery with his “They gonna put y’all back in chains” comment to a predominantly black audience in Virginia. Anger and demagoguery along racial lines are not an exclusive province of Obama, not then and certainly not now.

The larger point here is that the media has a double standard on race, and a double standard for Republicans. They like to talk about “dog whistles” among conservatives that — last time I checked — includes the words “Chicago” and “basketball.” When a Democrat of any background gets up and flat-out tells a predominantly black audience that the federal government likes the “suburbs” better than “our neighborhoods,” it doesn’t even get so much as a dog-biscuit mention by the media. When Tucker calls the original coverage “a subversion of what journalism’s supposed to be,” he’s absolutely right.

Will this video change minds about this election? I doubt it. Partisans have already chosen sides, and the undecideds and low-information voters will care more about the economy and perhaps the cover-up in Libya. This, however, serves as a good data point about media biases and double standards.